Will of Shadows: Inkwell Trilogy 2 (The Inkwell Trilogy)

by Aaron Buchanan

  I thought of apologizing and backtracking, but thought better of it. While interpersonal skills were not precisely my forte, I had an inkling that any apologies would only further enrage him. “I am the Keeper of the Well of Gods! My knowledge extends beyond the limits of my craft!” I pleaded.

  The alchemist reached for something on the tray next to him, pointed it at me and fired.

  When I awoke, I was on the ground—and out of the shadow pocket—staring through trees at a rising sun. I spent the next several hours retracing my steps, trying to find the way back in, yet found nothing. It was almost as if the way were blocked.

  The walk across Golden Gate Park took a bit longer than it should have, but when I came back to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of the city, the seeds of an idea were germinating for how I could help the alchemist.

  If he would let me.

  Chapter 2

  The idea of packing my bag and heading home was an overwhelming temptation. Though I feared if I were to leave, with him already knocking death’s door, he would pass and I would have no other recourse for finding anything out. Athena and Victoria had already exhausted their own knowledge regarding the magoi. If not for Zala, I would not even have this hope.

  “So, no luck, my dear?” Zala was waiting for me in my hotel room. At some point over the past few months, I stopped being surprised when she turned up out of nowhere. She was wearing her matronly crone form. Whereas the first time we met, she was a crazed beast turned loose on the unsuspecting farms of Vermont. She still had not divulged what had brought her from the Balkans to New England. She would tell me one day, I supposed. Still, she had been a sort of friend; an ally since Cevennes.

  “No. He threw me out. Only after knocking me out.” I was clearly frustrated, and Zala said nothing for several moments.

  Finally, she spoke: “He wants something, of that we can be sure. Everything I’ve heard of him, his mercy toward you belies his reputation.” Zala spoke cogently. Her years in captivity in the cage I had fashioned drove her to madness. That and whatever happened to her before. Now, though, she was lucid, and more than that—she was put together. Her clothing was pressed and neat. And while it looked old and several decades out of fashion—maybe by half a century or so—Zala looked like a normal human being.

  It was a little off-putting. What had made her the mad creature of The SUB—The Seedy Underbelly of the world—transform so completely since Cevennes? Did she feel some guilt at having inadvertently caused the deaths of so many of what remained of the world’s deities?

  “Yes.” I inhaled, only just then realizing I had repacked my suitcase only to start unpacking it. “He needs some time. I’ll burn some off. Go hit some of the Bay Area’s finest book shops. Maybe by the time I come back, he’ll have cooled off considerably.”

  Zala made a gravelly sound from her throat that reminded me of her raven-form. “Wise, Grey. Though you should realize that while he has information you are desperate to discover, his price for it will almost assuredly be more than what it seems.” She walked over to me and folded her arms. Even her hair was made out into a bun, held together with bobby pins. “Do not trust him under any circumstances.”

  I laid out a fresh change of clothes as I was about to jump in the shower before I went back out. “No. Of course not.”

  Zala uneasily placed one of her hands on my shoulder—however fleeting—and left my room.

  Once refreshed, I took a tour of San Francisco’s finest used book stores, hoping to while away enough time that I might make my way back to the Shadow Mill and find the alchemist had calmed down considerably. Furthermore, I had a hunch that I would only be able to find the path at dawn or dusk, when the shadows extended to their longest extent during a day. I would make him my offer from outside the windmill. Given the prevalence of silence at the Shadow Mill, I knew he would hear me. As long as he were there still. I might be able to track him, but given his experience, it didn’t seem a very likely occurrence. Hopefully, he was still capable of reason and would at least rest a while before he fled. Besides, I was not entirely sure he would make it very far.

  I ordered my driver around the city, finding a few items to pique my interest, but not a single tome I was inspired to put into my home library. The cabbie recommended a couple shops across the Bay Bridge in Oakland and Berkeley. It was only just past noon, so I took him up on his suggestions. Both stops proved very well worth it and once they saw how much money I was willing to spend, I started to see items that were not on display—including a first edition Voltaire I talked them into not putting to auction. I even got a line an early Shakespeare folio that might be coming to auction soon. My driver graciously smiled and pretended to be interested as I talked about Voltaire. By the time we were back in the city, I realized the sun would soon be setting. I asked him to park at the beach along the Great Highway and to wait as long as he could while I attended to business. It only occurred to me as I was stepping into the growth off the path that the driver probably thought this was a drug deal or something similarly black market.

  I paid him an extra sum to take the books to my hotel if I did not return in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe I should have been more concerned with what the alchemist might do to me if he were still incensed, but it was the books I worried about. Besides, I planned on taking a different tack upon meeting him this time, even if it meant being more aggressive than I would have liked.

  My theory about coming there at twilight proved a sound theory—and since I remembered some of the fauna along that path, it was modestly easier to find. I had no way of knowing if he had any alarms that would trip upon my entry into his shadow pocket, but I set my plan to action before even stepping through.

  Everything looked and sounded preternaturally the same as it did the evening before. I remember trampling some of the foliage during my circumference of the structure. Now, all the plants were precisely how they had been before. Plant life growing on this shadow plane was already a bewildering idea. The new evidence suggested it wasn’t growing. Or entirely living.

  With the events that led to the dismantling of rEvolve, I spent the intervening months taking my art on the offensive. It took me a few weeks of intensive digging, but I eventually found some tomes in my vault that helped. They were written Enochian. I have always dismissed the language—and by consequence, the books—because I have always believed it to be a garbage language; something concocted by the English academic—and Elizabeth I’s purported private magus—John Dee along with a mysterious occultist named Sir Edward Kelley.

  While the language itself may well have been an invention, it took me an additional month or so to decipher the writings. There remained some obvious cryptography for me to decipher, but the spells, in theory, were sound. In one of the books, there was even a spell for drawing out poison. While it was designed for usage with a natural poison, I thought that maybe with some of the more nuanced ancient languages, I could draw out the alchemist’s cancer. If it turned out to be some other kind of disease like emphysema or COPD, then, at the very least, I hoped to slow it.

  In the immediate meantime, I had another trick up my sleeve to help me deal with the alchemist—something else recently learned.

  The mirror-self I created walked forward to stand in front of where the mill’s door should be.

  The alchemist emerged from the wall as insubstantial as a ghost. He trained his tranquilizer on my double while I watched from a safe distance.

  Before he could even notice that the dart did not, in fact, go wide, but rather sailed through its target, I was slapping a Post-It on his back. “Sleep tight, sweetie,” I whispered, catching the frail man before he could face-plant into the ground. He was much lighter than I would have thought. Time was short.

  Once I figured out how to enter the Shadow Mill itself (apparently, only he could enter, but since I was carrying him over the threshold, I could enter too). I laid him on the same futon I had awoken from hours before.

&nb
sp; There was no easy way to diagnose him, so I applied the spell for withdrawing poison, hoping it was cancer from which he suffered. No sooner had I begun imparting my will into the spell, I received confirmation. The cancer liquefied into viscous, burgundy liquid.

  “Yuck.” I continued to write on his flesh spells to heal; spells to replenish blood loss. Given the advance stage of the cancer, and the sheer amount of liquid I caught—and emptied several times—in his cookware, I did not think the effects would be permanent. He was dying. I was merely delaying that from happening. I had hoped to give him a renewed lease on life. I wasn’t sure how the Shadow Mill was plumbed, precisely, but there was washroom. Pouring the last saucepan of the fetid, cancerous liquid down the drain, I took vigil by his side. I did not want to be near him when he woke, but I could not leave him until he was close to waking. I had long since removed the Post-It that put him to sleep. Still, he slumbered soundlessly on the same futon I rested upon the night before. I was soon overtaken by the ennui of the moment. Ennui or simply creeped out by having just played magical oncologist. Also, listening for his breath in the already-eerie silence was unsettling. Looking to engage my mind on something else (cursing myself for not bringing one of my new books), I began looking around the Shadow Mill.

  What began as an honest quest for reading material ended with casual snooping. There was very little in the way of literature. The only books I found were all incomprehensible to me—alchemy. I did find, though, a shelf full of three-ring binders. I removed one from the shelf and opened. It was full of letters: hand-written letters displayed in plastic page protectors. I grabbed another binder, opened and found the same type of contents. I sat down on the floor and began thumbing through the first binder I grabbed.

  These letters were decades old—most dated from the 1970s. Unlike most letters, though, these were not addressed to a Dear So-and-So. Instead, they all read Dear Sir. The penmanship was almost certainly feminine and once examined, each letter was signed Leanne.

  I stood up and reached for a binder in the middle of the collection. This binder likewise was full of letters from a single writer. They were addressed to Hellbound. They were written in and signed in near-calligraphic script by a man named Jack DeLand. Some of the dates indicated they were written in the late 70s until sometime in the early 90s. I checked more binders and found each contained letters from particular individuals, with the binder furthest to the right being the most recent—the last letter from only a few months before.

  I returned to Jack DeLand’s letters and let my curiosity get the better of me. By the time I checked my phone again, a few hours had passed. The alchemist for whom I had just gone through such tremendous lengths to heal of Stage 4 cancer…was a murderer. Judging by the 30-or-so binders on the shelf, he had taken no less than 30 lives. Zala’s intel was that he used to work for the mob. These letters confirmed that. Each binder was full of letters from one of the loved ones whom he had killed. Jack DeLand was a mob informant’s brother. I was puzzled by how the correspondence could have been maintained if each letter was addressed to a legally guilty party, something told me that there were never any explicit admissions and therefore nothing the legal authorities could use to indict. Besides, these hits were done on behalf of a New York crime family, so fear probably purchased silence.

  Jack DeLand wrote to the alchemist taking for granted that man whom he wrote letters was beyond help, beyond salvation. Even still, Jack DeLand’s manner of speaking to the alchemist was cordial, if not even friendly as time passed and letters were exchanged.

  These were only the people who decided to write back. The ones who decided to interact with the murderer of a husband, father, lover, sister, whatever. How many more people did the alchemist send letters to? For the second time since entering the Shadow Mill, I was utterly disgusted. I immediately felt remorse for working what magic I did to heal him.

  “I’m not angry,” said a voice from over my shoulder. “I read your Post-It,” he explained. I’d written it in preparation to exit before he could wake. It told him where to find me if he thought he could help me. I even apologized for accosting him and healing him. I wish I could have taken that apology back. This man wasn’t worth apologies. “Those are the ones who forgave me.” His voice sounded like it was coming from the same distance as his first words; he had not, thankfully, moved any closer.

  “It’s none of my business.” I reached inside my jacket pocket for my Sharpie, uncapped it, and held it in my hand.

  “I did those things because for most of my life I was an animal living in a kennel,” he went on, “it was like Plato’s cave, but even then I was too rabid to see the real world for what it is.”

  I cleared my throat, “And what is that?” I asked.

  “A mess. But a beautiful mess.” He stepped closer. His footfalls somehow sounded heavier. “Triolo. My name is Mike Triolo. If you’re worried about me killing you, you shouldn’t. The only one dying here is me.” Triolo’s voice maintained its raspy timbre, though I no longer felt he was about to give way to the fits of hacking and choking like he did when we first met. “And thanks to you, maybe not as soon as I expected.”

  “I’m trying not to judge you…” I started, standing up to face him. He even seemed slightly taller, though the ravages of the disease still made him look unhealthy and slight.

  Triolo interrupted, “You should judge me. I would.”

  “Be that as it may, I came here for your help because the magoi are nearly extinct. I am the last logomancer I know of,” I left Joy’s pre-apprenticeship off the table for the moment. “I know of only one musimancer left.”

  “Last musimancer?” he asked, though I ignored him.

  “The last arithmancer was murdered. His apprentice kidnapped by an organization that calls themselves rEvolve,” I recounted, wondering how much he had actually learned of recent events. “Only with the help of a…” I wasn’t sure what to call Zala, actually, “friend was I able to learn about you.”

  The alchemist took weightier footsteps back to the futon and sat down. “I came here to die, you know.” Triolo rubbed at his scalp with both hands and once finished, he held his palms in front of his face, examining.

  “I can’t say I knew that,” I admitted. I crossed the room and sat cross-legged on the floor near him. “Nor can I say that I came here to heal you or that. What can you tell me of the magoi?”

  “What I will tell you is this—you are not the last logomancer. Your friend is not the last musimancer. Nor am I the last alchemist. The Triginta. The Thirty. How is it that your father left you so ignorant of these things?”

  That was the one question I most wanted answered. But The Triginta was a term I had heard recently. I considered what he said before answering, hoping that I would remember where I’d heard the name, other than the Latin word for 30.

  “Trick into?” It occurred to me. Zala first mentioned back when we met. She said she had heard my father talking to someone—and emissary from Trick Into. Obviously, she misheard.

  “What now?”

  “Nothing. No, my father never told me anything about The Triginta.” My eyes returned to his, hoping he would divulge more.

  “I had an apprentice once. I was shit for a teacher, though, so he left me in search of someone better; and for more arcane knowledge. Both, I guess.” Triolio began inspecting other parts of his exposed flesh, perhaps noticing for the first time it lacked the paper-thin, fragile quality it did before now. “That was one I found out about The Thirty. You see, there only ever 30 of us. I have no idea why that is, but I know that there can be no more than that at one time. So once a master takes an apprentice, it is an acknowledgement of preparing for death.”

  And that—that—was a bit of knowledge my father would have tried like hell to keep from me: preparing me to be the Keeper of the Well was preparation for his own passing on. I would have never let him teach me anything.

  “Wait—what?” I was dumbfounded. This information did
not jibe with any sense of logic.

  “It is the law among the mages that there be no more than 30 at a time. If there are more, they are taken out. Like the way I used to take people out back in the Burroughs.” Triolo’s accent was even more obvious now.

  “I…” I stammered, a logomancer lost for words.

  “So you know—I’m not angry with you for healing me because I know you couldn’t finish the job. The cancer will come back and I chances are I will hurt worse than before. I accept that I deserve this because I do not believe in an afterlife of punishment. Or an afterlife at all, for that matter.”

  Triolo took some twisted delight in being able to further atone for his crimes in this life. I wasn’t sure if I should be moved or frightened by the proposition.

  I wanted to ask more about The Triginta, but instead found myself curious about something else he said: “So, you said you had an apprentice?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, peeling back the sleeves of his robe. “He could be dead now. You have to understand—I was a stop-gap for a dying alchemist and I only began training some 15 years ago. Once I received my own cancer diagnosis a few years ago, I found a kid back in Minneapolis to take over.” This led me to believe he was able to prolong his life with his own magic before now. Still, three years is a hasty apprenticeship. This mystery apprentice could be anyone, anywhere. Or, like Triolo said, he could be dead already.

  I found myself gazing into my own lap. “I also came to ask for your help. Even if I’m not sure I want it, I think to advance without some form of help from you would be a mistake.” I stared back up to him and was surprised to meet his gaze once more.

  “I can’t really tell you anything more about mages who make up The Triginta, but if I can help you, I will.” Triolo stood up to reset the futon into its couched position and sat back down.